Read Belonging: A Culture of Place Online
Authors: Bell Hooks
Belonging: A Culture of Place (31 page)
I appreciate and understand a vision of marriage as a sacrament. P. Travis Krocker gives beautiful expression to what this means when he shares from a Christian standpoint that “giving ourselves away in marriage is an occasion of joy — we celebrate it because as humans we are made for intimate communion with God and with all of life.” Explaining further he contends: “The sacrament of marriage is therefore anything but a private, exclusive act. It is always related to the larger community of which it is a part. One of the greater dangers of romantic love is that it privatizes love, depriving it of essential nutrients. A flourishing marriage needs the community to sustain it and will in turn build up the community and the life of the world.” Indeed, I see this made evident in my parents’ long marriage and saw it in the marriage of more than seventy years of my maternal grandparents. Sadly, both these marriages were not particularly loving or joyful. Even so the conditions for love were present, care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust; all parties involved simply chose not to honor them in their wholeness. They chose instead to focus on care and commitment. As a witness to their lives, I can testify that they were fine disciplined examples of these two aspects of love. And despite the lack of sustained well-being in their marriages, I am still awed and impressed by the power of their will to commit. I long for such lifelong commitment in the context of a loving relationship.
Significantly, these two marriages lasted so long precisely because they took place in the context of community. They were buttressed by the constant interplay of life within extended family, church, work, and a civic world — a life in community. When I began to move past my harsh critiques of my parents’ marriage, of their dysfunction, I could see positive aspects of their bonding. I could even feel envy. What I most admired and admire about their life is their capacity for disciplined commitment, their engagement in making and sustaining a life in community. And even though they did not create for themselves a loving bond, they did prepare the ground for love by sowing two important seeds, care and commitment, which I take to be essential to any effort to create love. Consequently, I am grateful to them for providing me and all their children an understanding via their life practice of what sustained commitment and care look like.
I am especially blessed to have lived long enough and to have parents still alive to whom I can express gratitude for their gifts of care and commitment. In his insightful essay, “An Economy of Gratitude,” Norman Wirzba shares this understanding: “In the practical, mundane, sustained commitment to place and community the marks of gratitude … come into clearer focus.” He defines those marks as “affection, attention, delight, kindness, praise, conviviality, and repentance.” All these defining marks are present when I commune with our parents in our native place, in their Kentucky home. Gone is the spirit of conflict and contestation that for years characterized our interactions. By letting us know that there was no conflict that would be powerful enough to shatter ties of care and commitment, our parents, especially our mother, made it possible for there to always be a place of reconciliation, a place to come together, a way to return home.
Krocker emphasizes the importance of creating a “community of care” so that our relationships with one another can be “governed by conviviality rather than suspicion, by praise rather than blame.” Furthermore: “In a community of care people are turned toward one another. They have given up the false, perpetually deferred dream that happiness lies somewhere else with other people.” And that includes embracing our parents, accepting them for being who they are and not for becoming what we wanted or want them to be. Again Krocker explains: “As we work with others, and as we endeavor to get to know them, we learn to appreciate them in their depth and integrity and with a better appreciation for their potential and need. We see them for the unique creatures they are and begin to approach the complexity, beauty and mystery of every created thing and person. The loveliness of who they are starts to dawn on us, calling forth within us a response of love and celebration.” Certainly, this has been my experience both in my relationship to my parents, the community of my growing up, and now to the place in Kentucky that is my home.
Communities of care are sustained by rituals of regard. Eating together was a central focus of family gatherings in our household. At the table we share our accounts of daily life, humor, and the sheer pleasure of delicious home cooked food. Our mother was a great cook. I share with Krocker the belief that: “Around the table we create the conditions for conviviality and praise. In the sharing of the meal we give concrete expression to our gratitude. We catch a taste of heaven.” This was certainly true in the kitchen of our mother’s house.
Sadly, in her new state of lost memory, Mama no longer cooks, or finds delight in delicious eating. She has to be coaxed to come to the table. This is often the case with those who suffer dementia or Alzheimer’s. New rituals of regard are needed. Before her memory loss, Mama was always on her feet working, cooking, cleaning, meeting someone else’s needs. In their patriarchal marriage, she waited on our father hand and foot. Now she needs us to serve her, to dedicate ourselves to her comfort and care. This service is the enactment of a ritual of regard. The devotion she arouses in her loved ones is a natural outcome of the care and commitment she has extended to all of us. And even though it has been hard for Dad to change, to accept the end of certain forms of patriarchal privilege that he has assumed were his birthright simply by having been born male, he is learning to be a caregiver to her.
Nowadays, Mama spends much of her time sitting. There are beautiful and wondrous aspects to her current forms of self-expression and identity. It is a joy to sit next to her, to be able to hold her close, to caress her hands, all gestures that would have been impossible in the past. She would have deemed it silly to be sitting around talking of love when there was work to be done. How wonderful it is to have these new experiences with her converge with the old, to see her so tender, so vulnerable, so without the restraints of shame and conventional inhibitions. Now I see in her the wildness of spirit she once saw in me and wanted to crush for fear it was dangerous. My gratitude that I can be present — a witness to her life now — as she struggles to make sense of the dots that do not connect, as she journeys towards death, knows no bounds. Also it is good to witness Dad gracefully walking down the mountain giving him now and then a helping hand.
Krocker believes that “as we dedicate ourselves to one another, and thus experience daily and directly the diverse array of gifts that contribute to our living, gratitude will take its rightful place as the fundamental disposition that guides and forms our ways.” Gratitude allows us to receive blessings; it prepares the ground of our being for love. And it is good to see that in the end, when all is said and done — love prevails.
Table of Contents
1 Preface: To Know Where I’m Going
5 Reclamation and Reconciliation
7 Again — Segregation Must End
8 Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination
10 Earthbound: On Solid Ground
11 An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional
13 A Place Where the Soul Can Rest
14 Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand
18 Healing Talk: A Conversation